Discoveries from Austria World Cinema

Time as a fundamental element of film is used to alter the interplay between image and space through changing speeds and perspectives.

As the day of the family photo approaches, panic sets in because there's something the family doesn't know yet: Barbara is Berry and non-binary. What's more, the long hair that her parents always loved is now gone. The image of their daughter in a floral dress hasn't really been Berry for a long time, or perhaps never was. Except that one time a year, for the sake of Mom and Dad. The family gathering becomes a nightmare, and coming out feels like holding a sword of Damocles over Berry's head, with the implication of "always having to be different..." hanging over them. The film takes us on a journey of identity and embodiment, constantly torn between anxiety and finding a sense of belonging within the community. —Julia Sprenger

The theme is a wordless but nonetheless critical observation and juxtaposition of the historical and - at the time - modern architecture in Vienna with the decay, destruction and redesign of functional buildings, the beauty and ugliness of an old city and its pathos, and its new outskirts. In the second part of the film, a technique of double exposure, the superimposition of color negative and positive, is used as a kind of transfiguration of the situation. (...) Stoned Vienna was made around the same time as ViennaFilm 1896-1976 by Ernst Schmidt jr. That's why there are a number of parallels that came about by chance. A repeatedly exposed scene, the wax doll Dolly, a symbol of the way Vienna is treated, was made available to Ernst Schmidt jr. as a contribution to his ViennaFilm. (Moucle Blackout)

A work on the perception of space, where a video of a motionless figure in a room correlates four different camera positions with four different synthesized tones. We see the inert artist and how she calmly faces the cameras head-on. Six minute version.

In this wondrously captivating experiment, Albert Sackl creates a quasi-stereoscopic effect by moving a Bolex camera on a rail from left to right, continuously capturing two frames on each side. The way in which these come together in a small perspectival point makes gestures seem to quiver, bodies tremble, and buildings shake. Silently, not only the two different angles but also the individuals in the frame find their way towards each other.

A work by Billy Roisz.

Dennis Ranalter is one of the world's most respected freeride skiers, his playful style and technical ability earning him a wide fan base and the widely used moniker: D-RAN. Yet away from a name that showcases his self-assurance on the steep slopes of Austria, Dennis’s struggles with identity run deep. At its heart, the question of race and what it means to be black in a sport that remains predominantly and conspicuously white. Descendance is Dennis’s story, a personal journey of self-exploration that examines his relationship with his own skin color, with those closest to him and all those who share his love of skiing. It’s a journey that takes him from his home valley in Austria to Accra, the capital of Ghana, shining a light on the power of family along the way.

Dark Tourism in the Mud of Market Garden

A poignant, erotic tale of forbidden love between two men set against the bustling backdrop of Istanbul's traditional hammams.

A frame-by-frame animated, drawn invitation to participate in a game of imagination. It is an attempt, to discover the blurred lines between dreaming and being awake and an approach to realities.

If only they looked up, they could meet each other.

The protagonist wants to create something. Motivation generates an idea in his head, but when he starts to execute it, the doubts arise. The idea is discarded. The story is about a single person and the opposite perspectives within themselves, but also emphasises that both perspectives originate from the same source, the same person, the same material.

A drama set in the near future, it centers on Marius and his daughter Lisa, who are currently experiencing a financial crisis. In order to regain their success, Marius decides to participate in an experiment that has serious consequences for the family.

Claudia Larcher conjures up the dissolving self in the digital age. As algorithms deform photos of the filmmaker in fascinating ways, chatbots can be heard philosophizing about identity. What this yields is not at all artificial, but rather, an urgent confrontation with how we perceive ourselves.

A traveler sets out in search of clues in the landscape of his memories — at the Evros River, which forms part of the border between Turkey and Greece. Here he meets a forensic pathologist who tries to identify those refugees who died while crossing the river. A story about drawing borders and crossing them becomes a visually powerful, sensitive, and relentless documentary essay about current political failure.

The siblings Vroni and Flori observe the goings-on at their parents’ flower stall. Vroni claims to know the future. Aleksey Lapin believes her and shows a microcosm through which the marginalized stroll, while a wind that will change everything brews in the air. A playful ode to the feeling that nothing has to be as it is.

Huge wandering dunes on the Baltic, thousands of lakes in the dream landscape of Masuria, gigantic river systems of Biebrza and Narew, mystical primeval forests and the rugged crags of the Southern mountains: all of this is Poland. No other country in Europe has more square kilometres of national parks.

The reserved Julia has traveled to Vienna, especially to surprise her sister Johanna at her art performance. Johanna has rented a room for her feminist performance, hired two musicians and invited everyone she knows. However, the vernissage apparently turns into a miserably unsuccessful evening, which might bring the two siblings closer together again.

Documentary about the outskirts of Berlin.

In the spring of 2018, the filmmaker Maria Petschnig befriended Marc who at that time was living in his car in Brooklyn for more than a year, while also holding a day job. Petschnig started to record his life and struggle, his thoughts, routines, etc. over the course of two years.

A record of the lockdown spring of 2020, shot from the window of the director’s rented apartment in Vienna. Diary entries help to stave off the madness of isolation. The camera keeps track of time and reclaims the past. Cinema offers a reprieve from loneliness.

The subtitle of this merry performance is "An Action Text", indicating that the artist's introduction for the vaudeville number was an inflammatory impetus. Export provides precise instructions for the use of a wrapped box of chocolate-covered candy produced by the renowned Viennese company Hofbauer. However, she has not made an advertisement for them and their presentation, but instead, she extols the packqge and confection as a work of art. Severe degradation of the surviving tape further blurs our perceptions.

"ROTOЯ | Sonic Body" by artist collective NO1 is a physically intense perception cinema and phenomenological study. At visual and acoustic levels, the video confronts the fundamental categories of movement, time, and space.

We do not doubt the existence of humans. On the other hand, we still do not know why we exist or how we came into existence. This film deals with man's eternal dream to discover his origins.

Images and sounds of Anpass in Tyrol, shot between 1970 and 1973.

Dominik has been terrified by dentists since his childhood. So Helga, his fiance, rents a flat which was formerly a dental surgery. Their new landlord, Barbara, is a dentist and she runs her surgery next door. Helga persuades Dominik to move into the flat. For her a dream comes true but for Dominik a nightmare begins.

The young Viennese gypsy musician Joshi Szalay travels to India and takes the same route that his ancestors had followed but in the opposite direction. His trip covers Hungary, Yugoslavia, Romania, Greece, Anatolia and finally the northwestern part of the Indian subcontinent. The pop musician encounters gypsies who still retain many of the authentic customs, traditions, morals, taboos, legends and music of their nomadic ancestors.

Ludwig Wüst shows a mysterious meeting in Ostia, at the very place where Pier Paolo Pasolini was killed on November 2, 1975. A stranger tells that back then everything was different and that he is the only one that knows the real story of Pasolini's death

Juana, a young Bolivian woman, gets a job in a sewing workshop in Buenos Aires. In exchange, she has to leave her husband and son behind in Bolivia. Upon arriving in Buenos Aires, she discovers that the promised workshop is a prison where work is carried out under inhumane conditions. When Juana receives news from home, she tries to escape by any means possible.

The desert city of Agadez in Niger has been a hub of trade routes since time immemorial. The local Tuareg population always earned a good living by transporting goods and people across the Sahara. But Agadez is also a place where migrants pass through on their way to Europe.

On May 30, 2023, the German mountaineer Luis Stitzinger was found dead at an altitude of 8,400 meters on Kangchenjunga, just five days after he reached the summit. It was his tenth eight-thousander. He had climbed seven of them with his wife, Alix von Melle. More than a year later, Alix travels to Nepal again to fulfill her husband’s last wish: scatter his ashes on one of the high peaks in the land of his dreams. The chosen mountain is the 7,246-meter peak Dhaulagiri VII in the Nepalese Himalayas.

Viktoria Schmid’s 16mm film installation I escaped from this into the cinema, ... (2018-2026) is based on James Clerk Maxwell’s method of additive colour mixing, which led to the first colour photograph in 1861. Footage of water features from different parts of the world, shot over a period of several years, merge into a new work using a trichromatic projection technique. At each location, three shots were taken on black-and-white film, each through a filter of a different colour (Red / Green / Blue). By projecting the images with three projectors through the corresponding filters, and by adding extra screens, they manifest themselves in varying degrees of overlap to form a final colour image. The projection ‘dispositive’ makes the relationship between colour and time tangible. Panta rhei — everything flows.

At 67, Teresa's life is defined by the pain she carries in her body—invisible, yet ever-present. In search of relief, she lies down on the floor, at home or under a tree, near her "little heaven," a comforting amulet. But when patterns from the past return, Teresa must flee. This time, not from a man, but into an unexpected journey with her daughters—one of whom is the director of this film.

This is a story of an introvert facing challenges when constantly being pushed to be more outgoing.

To achieve her lifelong dream, an 80 year old actress takes on the male-dominated Indian film industry, and unwillingly becomes a leading advocate for women's rights.

A letter from the dead dog Laika, the first conqueror of space. This is the story of her heroic deeds and martyrdom, a document of one of many lives it was deemed necessary to sacrifice in the name of the human plan for conquest and domination.

This film begins with black women dancing and black men expressing their praise: They are praising Austria. For over ten years, the 'alpine republic' has been cooperating with the ten parched Cape Verde Islands in the Atlantic Ocean near the west coast of Africa. In total, seven completely different projects are presented and evaluated critically. In passing, the viewer also learns something about the country and its people: Young people curse the beautiful archipelago, calling it a hole, a prison, hell... They are unable to find work. The individual character of the Austrian projects enable the cinematic discussion of some basic concepts of development politics. This film takes a look, both affectionate and critical, at a distant and exotic country which comes closer to us the longer The Meeting of the Islands lasts.

The film revolves around a writer with creative problems. His good ideas always seem to slip away from him, so he wastes his days.

to forget is a filmic journey on the potentialities of forgetting and its resemblance to remembering. Recorded on expired Super-8 and 16mm film, forgetting becomes productive and ”’visible” in non-existing, fading and colour-transformed film exposures. This (non-)documentation of possibly empty and fading spaces (to be) is further highlighted by Jejuno’s trance-like and uncanny sound composition: The abyss is present.

Another try by the Viennese actionists around Otto Mühl, trying to shock the middle-class bourgeoisie with all sorts of explicit sexual and excretory processes.

Vienna, 1902. 19-year-old Lina marries the architect Adolf Loos hoping for a free life. But Loos imposes severe restrictions on her - she falls into a passionate affair. Loos tries to win her back and Lina makes a fateful decision.

At the end of 1996 in an old shop in Vienna specialising in film materials I found a tin with indeterminable pieces of 16mm film showing much wear and tear. They dated from the late 60s. After a cursory glance I thought 'yes'. The found footage material was ideal for the horror series. Corridor is the 5th film in the horror series "Black Garden‘ along with The Murder Mystery (1987/92), Blicklust (1992), Party (1995), Macumba (1995/96).

The story of my Vietnamese father who was able to build up a new life in a small Austrian village, but there is still an open chapter in the past: the search for the man who once helped him and who he never could thank for that.

A documentary that traces the path of Muslim scholar and political theorist Muhammad Asad, which led to his conversion to Islam.

A stop motion short film about a complex mother daughter relationship. The story follows a worried mother who controls her daughter like a puppet with strings to keep her safe. As the daughter grows older, she fights against her constraints to free herself, leading to unexpected consequences. By exploring the balance between care and abusive overprotection, the film delves into the topic of personal freedom.

When Billy Roisz’s images and dieb13’s sound (remix: gnu) are brought together in this way, oberflach.avi becomes a unique experience.

An irritable gargoyle spends 800 years stuck on the side of a cathedral with a decorative metal rain gutter as the world changes for better and for worse.

A portrait of ex-S.S. officer Paul Hafner, who moved to Madrid under Franco in 1945 and has no moral qualms about his past.